Funny thing happened in New York City

Screech of subway trains. Blasts of jack hammers. Certain noises I associate with Manhattan. That’s one reason my family and I moved upstate, to get away from the din. But on Monday night, in Greenwich Village, at the first public airing of my novel, I heard another emphatic sound — as if for the first time. A more pleasant noise.

Laughter.

Until that first chuckle rose from the audience, what I mainly heard was the pounding of my pulse in my skull. I’d ascended the stage at Cornelia Street Café with great apprehension. After years of revisions and months of editing, I was about to try out my comedic novel on a crowd of actual people. My friends and family packed the place, but also lots of people I never met, who’d showed up come to hear the other three readers.

So when it came my turn to read, my heart beat like it was someone else’s organ. Trying to ignore it, I gazed down at my manuscript. The stage light was so blinding I hardly saw the audience. I cleared my throat and began.

I heard the first chuckle around the sixth paragraph. I read how a doctor tells the main character, Daniel Plotnick, that his cancer is curable. “If you’re going to get cancer, thyroid is the one to get! Ninety perfect cure rate!” Honestly, I hadn’t known that line was funny. But more laughter arose after Plotnick, upon learning the truth – he’s actually not curable — attempts to self-soothe. “By force of habit as a journalist, he tried to distract himself with less catastrophic usages. Bacon is cured, he mused. But there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues!”

Then I related that Plotnick’s wife Melissa felt guilty about his cancer because, at the age of nine-and-a-half, she’d accidentally killed her hamster. Her mother, a member of PETA, banned her from owning a hamster ever again. Melissa felt like the kiss of death. By itself, the passage may not sound funny. And yet I heard an actual guffaw. You can fake applause but not a guffaw. The laughter calmed me. I forgot my heart was on a run-away train. As my fifteen “Andy Warhol” minutes ticked past, it occurred to me that people had bought my story. As I stepped down from the stage I thought, well, maybe my novel was OK, after all. If it can make it here, as Frankie says, the city will never sleep. Or something like that.

For a long time I didn’t think of myself as funny. I often felt morose. Glum. But a teacher of mine at Bennington College’s MFA program, who liked a comedic short story of mine, insisted I mine this vein. My forthcoming novel, The Opposite of Everything, was by far my biggest and riskiest attempt.

Tell you something about New York City. They make a damn good cappuccino here. If you ask for grilled tuna pink in the middle, it’s pink in the middle. Up near me, north of Albany, it’s more hit and miss. Too many times I ordered a latte and was given an insanely hot milky substance. What passes for gourmet food upstate might not last a month in New York’s Darwinian restaurant scene.

But acceptance tastes the same in both places. Though perhaps louder in one than the other. I rediscovered this during my four-day trip to New York City. The experience discombobulated me so much I’m mixing metaphors here.